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Words and Painting Exchange Roles:Concrete Poetry, Experimental Poetry, & Fine Arts in Portugal

Eduardo Paz Barroso

When considering the relations between concrete poetry,experimental poetry, and visual arts in Portugal, we can be

informed by the writing around and of surrealism, cubist collage,and action painting. All these aesthetic trends provide the means andcontexts for new forms of visual thinking that experimental poetryformulates, questioning and self-questioning with principles that exposepoetic creation simultaneously as creation and theoretical enunciation.Several points of contact and aesthetic affinities between these trendsare identifiable with some of the most significant moments of Portuguesevisual arts. However, any correspondence between the critical analysis ofpictures and the concerns of experimental and concrete poetry have notbeen sufficiently explored.

The place of poetry in modern and contemporary Portugueseliterature marks a kind of originality without a name. More than a purepurpose of language and its subject, it is an accelerated experimentation.This is due both to the dizzying capacity of the "saying" as to theimagery of the word that breaks through as a "pluri-significant" eventfull of oniric possibilities. In this context the term Literature has not somuch its institutional and ideological meaning which refers to a "theoryof literature" but is rather an "archipelago of metaphors" (Lourenço,1988:205). Each metaphor has its own filament, its demarcation ofepisodes where language breaks all the rules of grammar, according tothe criteria of a solitary poetic authorship that resists the identificationwith the person of the author.

POETIC DEFLAGRATIONS

The question of poetic making being simultaneously writing andtheorizing is closely connected to the poetic innovations of the 1960s.At that time alignments with social advocacy, militant complaints ofthe political situation, or humanist concerns were left behind. It wasalso the turning point of Presencist' conventions in which the newgenerations could not recognize themselves. Realism and mysticismtend to blur together and, above all, something torrential is sensed indebut books such as Aquete Grande Rio Eufrates (That Great RiverEuphrates) by Ruy Belo, or the second and third titles by HerbertoHelder, "A Colher na Boca" ("The Spoon on the Mouth") (included in0 Amor em Visita (Love Visiting) and Poemacto (Poemact) (all publishedin 1961 except O Amor in 1958). In this dynamic of rupture it is alsoimportant to note the publication of the series of small books Poesia 61(Poetry 61) (which brought together poems by Gastâo Cruz, Luiza NetoJorge, Fiama Hasse Pais Brandào, Casimiro de Brito, and Maria TeresaHorta). Not coincidentally Herberto Helder will appear in variousmanifestations associated with experimental poetry. Luiza Neto Jorgedidn't have the same kind of involvement with experimental poetry, butshe develops a written poetry of powerful imagery, where we observethe disfigurement of speech along with an incisive force, able to disruptthe narrative and impose in some texts a kind of erotic cadence of theword. These characteristics explain the publication in 1972 of her book-object entitled 0 Ciclópico Acto (The Cyclopean Act) in collaborationwith the painter Jorge Martins.^ It is a remarkable interpénétration ofpoetry and visual arts that, although not complying with the codes ofpoetic experimentation, can be integrated into this critical questioning

of the relationship between poetry and the visual arts. In terms of theintertextual possibilities of the poem and its reference to some aspects ofexperimental poetry, read for example: •*

Uns: crèmes, espumas, espermas, cuspos—outros:mais barato, mais húmido, mais tu-me-fac-to comovente a simples confissSo: "teu, tua"(Some men: creams, foams, sperm, spits—other men:cheaper, more humid, more in-fla-ted ^moving the simple confession: "he's yours, she's yours.")

But Portuguese poetry of the 1960s is also definitely marked byconcrete poetry, which according to some critics (Nava, 1988:151)allows us to see an "internationalist vocation, and mainly the Brazilianinfluence." The two debut publications of this trend or tendency are thetwo volumes oí Poesia Experimental (Experimental Poetry) (1964 and1966). Some of the poets included are Antonio Aragào, E. M. de Melo eCastro, Ana Hatherly, Salette Tavares, Alberto Pimenta, and HerbertoHelder.

It is important to stress that poetic experimentation, in commonwith other aesthetic manifestations that are also a rupture, turns inon itself and exposes the material that makes it—that is languageitself. This trend towards a self-rooting of the poem and its writing iscompatible with the search for a diction that is beyond all sentences, andcorresponds to the attitude that, given the evidence of a constellation ofvoices, insists on walking on the uneven intersections that exist amongall of them. And this way to find out what is said, not in the sense of asearch or research of a "recitation," but as a reflection of viscerality andbelonging, is also the strange occupation of an unlikely place.

A new set of aesthetic values dominated by negativity andfragmentation, a certain wandering of meaning, and a dismemberment ofthe text all point to other requirements of writing. The instability of thesubject, or even its disappearance, is due to a "failure of mimesis" (Pintodo Amaral, 1988:160). In this critical analysis of the poetry of the 1970sand 1980s Pinto do Amaral highlighted the contribution o( Poesia 61 andPoesia Experimental for the autonomy of the poetic text, situated "in asort of neutral zone of sense," an "almost pure object, at the same timeimmune and susceptible to all hermeneutics."

There were a plurality of ways through which this conditioninfluenced subsequent poetry, and the very evolution of some of theauthors situated within this paradigm. An excellent example of thisfusion of the poem in a theory of the self (which includes the duplicity ofthe literary and biographical fiction) is found in A Noçào de Poema (TheConcept of Poem) by Nuno Judice (1972:11-12):

"I try to express myself in the physical truth of thegesture. There are no sensations irreducible to neithera word or genres incapable of modification. I alwaysresigned myself to the excessive yoke of the poem andnever, in assuming the aesthetic materialism, allowedmyself to limit the poem or even to work it. What ispoetry but the excessive knowledge of the image, the fulltransfiguration of the rule in horizon, of the plastic inconsciousness? What is the word but the prodigious riverof the senses, the architectural space of order?"

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ANA HATHERLY: A HAPPENING OF THE WORD

In a 1977 essay for the magazine Coloquio Letras Ana Hatherlyrefers to the need, in the approach to poetic phenomenon, to establishnew semantic relationships that do not require orthodox understandings,while stressing the dependence of the written text on a particularspecialization and knowledge on the part of the reader. A quote by MaxBense (1910-1990), one of the theoreticians of concrete poetry, signals animportant theoretical change: "with the definition of the visual texts, thegeneral theory of the text goes into a general theory of image" (Hatherly,1977: 5).

The defense of the text as an "art object" helps to explain acertain poetic value of action painting and art informel/ Informal Art, 'which is not alien to the author's own visual practice. Committed toaccentuate the "universality of contemporary art," Hatherly implicitlyshifts concrete poetry and poetic experimentation to a zone of thedash, drawing, and painting and at the same time she highlights thecivilizational value of cinema. Doing this, she reveals an intuition forthe growing importance of visual thinking, where the movies occupya crucial position. The idea of a reconfiguration of the sign is crucialto this aesthetic movement which sees in the written form a kindof a drawing that uses letters and feeds an experience of the worldtransformed into plastic investment of meaning. The parallelism andsimilarity of writing and visual image give rise to reversibility—the wordas painting and painting as word.

Naturally, it is also important to take into account the Easterntradition of Zen philosophy and calligraphic painting that somecontemporary artists have adopted as inspiration and working basis, as isthe case of Jean Degottex, some works by Tapies, as well as in Portugalwith Eurico Gonçalves, Antonio Sena, and some works of Arpad Szenes(a subject which merits further development). For Ana Hatherly thisprocess can also be a form of subversion, specifically the dismantlingof the psychological and logical system that underlies the maintenanceof society (Hatherly, 1977:14). Personalization, what we might call arefractory dimension of the "I" shaped to drawing as an evidence initself (evidence of the subject, her/his contradictions, her/his need forprotest) is markedly present in concrete and experimental poetry. Itis a reaction to the depersonalization brought about by the press, andinterpreted in this context as a typical phenomenon of consumer society(Hatherly, 1977: 13).

Discussions about the consumer society help us to understandand put in perspective this poetic trend, for which everything containssignificance. Concrete poetry is poetry where things simply are. This isin striking contrast with the habits of a consumer society where thingssimply disappear, or take the spectacular appearance of merchandise(to accommodate the suggestive thesis of Guy Debord, so revisitednowadays). Understanding experimental texts implies some ideologicallinkages to theory that lead immediately to the work of Adorno. Oneexample is an essay by Alberto Pimenta (1988) who questions theunderstanding of the poetic act as "an impossible whose only purposeis to deny this logical or pragmatic impossibility." The main function ofpoetry thus understood is to "deny." Poetry leaves aside subterfuge andmagic to focus on itself and explain itself as eviscerated word. Hence thequote from Adorno made by A. Pimenta (1988,146) in his essay: "it is byexposing itself to, or escaping from, the irreconcilable that substantiallydefines the level of a work of art" (Adorno). To inquire about thechallenges faced by the poetic making, therefore, is the next question,based on a critique of Aristotelianism. From it, Alberto Pimentapromotes the "invention of forms" where the visual and the literarymeet. One of the most curious aspects of this reaction to the consumersociety is a defiation of representation that experimental poetry allowed.

In summary, we have to admit the coexistence of two poetics (orrather, two ways of making poetry) that have in common the refusal toname "things as they are." One operates at the level of meaning and themetaphor is its "queen-figure." The other operates at the immanent level

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Ana Hatherly, Dramng (Revolution). 197S,India ink on paper, 27.2 x 25.4 in.,

Fundaçào de Serralves - Museu de Arte Contemporánea, PortoPhotography by Filipe Braga

of the sign and its main figure is the pun (and therefore its use of soundsimilarities between words and it explanation of differences in meaning).

Naturally, it's to the second option that concrete poetry adheres.Alberto Pimenta demonstrates this by relying on one of the theoristsof the movement, the Austrian Heinz Gappmayr, when emphasizingthe distinction between the empirical character of a sign and itsconceptual level, both delivered to an ambivalence that concrete poetryrenders "transparent" (Pimenta, 1988:146). Poetry devoid of symbols,of metaphorical dimension, of the abstraction of linguistic formulas,turns easily into the "thing itself," the very same thing that the materialand plastic side of painting, in certain circumstances (action painting,abstract expressionism, art informel, tachisme, etc.) also objectifies.

The timeline of the concrete perspective in Portugal, as tracedby Alberto Pimenta, takes Almada Negreiros (1893-1970) as the mainreference, and defines the late 1950s and early 1960s as the mostenergetic time of the movement. Pimenta distinguishes this from thephase which favors combinatorial games and random permutations inthe 1970s, and then considers a period of radicalization when the denialof the "semantic space" is sharper, and sensoriality ceases to be onlyvisual and acoustic and is now also performative in the sense of thehappening and performance languages. This dilution of boundariesbetween art and everyday life finds a theatrical raison d'etre in this otheraspect of concrete poetry's relationship with visual arts.

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WHEN THE TEXT-IMAGE FRAMES UP THE MEANING

In A Reinvençâo da Leitura (The Reinvention of Reading) (1975),Ana Hatherly reminds us that it is impossible to divorce the study of theorigin of poetry as a written text from its pictorial aspect. The essay isaccompanied by nineteen drawings by the author who calls them "visualtexts," as a possible demonstration of her thesis. The text emphasizesthe idea that all writing has its origin in painting and thereby generatesmental processes of communication in which seeing and thinking areintertwined. Information theory, the theory of Max Bense, variousworks by visual artists, and the Eastern tradition of Zen, are the fourfactors on which this conception lies (Hatherly, 1975: 6).

Hatherly's essay derived in good measure from the need to justifythe importance of the concrete perspective, and to rescue it from itsminority status in the Portuguese cultural scene. This concern is basedon a strategy of vanguardist affirmation by which experimental poetry isidentified. This leads to a need for increasing the status and ambiguitiesof the concept of the vanguard, its history, and critical recognition. Inone respect at least the author is right, given the situation that emergedfrom the late 1950s to the mid-1970s—the difficulty of accepting apoetry that is at all lyrical-discursive. "Nevertheless, after more than adecade of publications and cultural dissemination by the few Portugueseavant-garde authors, in some sectors begins to be drawn a tendency toaccept the text-image" (Hatherly, 1975: 17).

Alberto Pimenta (1988:148-149) documents the Portugueseconcrete perspective with some examples from the work of seven visualpoets: Salette Tavares, Antonio Aragao, Ana Hatherly, E.M. de Meloe Castro, José Abilio dos Santos (Abilio), Fernando Aguiar, and CésarFigueiredo. Melo e Castro is depicted as "the most active in Portugaland abroad as a theorist and popularizer of the movement." Pimenta alsorecognizes the vastness of his work and his systematic experimentalism.In Salette Tavares we find form and irony at the service of ambiguity,an enormous capacity to highlight the serious side of the sign, andthe transience of the text when viewed in its formal aspect. About A.Aragao, Pimenta highlights the "strong feelings" that his work causes,and the creative processes like the use of grids to draw up the "anatomyof volant words." Fernando Aguiar takes the reader to the heart of theletter ("the most consistent lettrist of the last twenty years"); letters inweb (plotting sometimes the direction) are a permanent trap that can becompared to the skill of the magician who manipulates decks of cardsand slippery suits. Abilio refers to a theoretically reckless marginalitythat somehow was also Pimenta's: "for him all the epistemologicalfoundation is repressive" (and Pimenta praises his consequent temper).César Figueiredo seems (at least in several of his works) to break thetext, or rather its monumentality ("Camoes tattered by a lieutenantof philology," is how Pimenta characterizes him, after setting him ina tactical and warmongering device where the words are seen as an"army"). Finally Hatherly is "mistress of all aesthetic annunciations"because of the variety and diversity of her production. Her work goesbeyond an insistent playfulness of language and becomes transformedinto a sinuous drawing—a handwriting ripe for all uses and disuses.

This brief critical overview provides the core data to go fromconcrete poetry to painting as they intersect and sometimes becomeindistinguishable. Everything starts with the visual condition of the text.This is also apparent from a recommendation given to inexperiencedreaders of such texts by a specialized journal—initially, don't even try toread the concrete poems, it is preferable instead to observe the spaces,typography, or other variations on the page. ' The most importantsuggestion was to consider the poem as an image and then observe thatfrom this same image appear ideas associated with letters (Hatherly,1975:18). Melo e Castro (1973:15) gives emphasis to the idea that we arefacing a poetry that "makes people open their eyes."

With eyes and senses wide open, the reader gets a new verbalarticulation. In this perspective we apply the term "verbivocovisual"(which refers to James Joyce and his questioning of the universe of

oriental ideograms that interested him so much). It is a mobilizationof senses and capabilities that raises the interaetion of different levelsof communication, which can also play an important part in theassimilation of visual art, populated by resonances of writing andsound. Phonic, optical, and language structures all work togethersimultaneously, interacting with each other in a demonstration againstthe "perspectival syntactic organization, where words sit like corpses ina banquet" (Hatherly, 1975:19).

Painting can also be a way to make readable the subtle shades ofwriting. To encounter the word and the life it gives is to establish anew route in which these artists are engaged. It is to recognize signs, tofollow them according to insights and gestures, building bridges betweenlegibility and illegibility. To scrutinize the meaning for the reader is anactivity that Hatherly (1975:22) values, particularly when questioning herown practice as a creator of texts-images, and invokes the need to extendthe field of reading out of "literalness."

Naturally, this evolution is an ongoing task of literature and artin general. These literal-averse practices cultivate discourses deprivedof immediate meaning and make a kind of deferred sense from thecommunication experience that combines text and interpreter in thesame significant space. On the other hand the notion of literariness(created by the Russian formalists) and its discussion (and subsequentrefutation by some thinkers as the American theorist and critic JonathanCuller) helps to clarify this issue, since it deals with the identificationof properties that state what makes a text a literary text, and whichcharacteristics may be common among similar works. We can findan element of friction in visual poetry—why are these texts literarytexts? Concrete poetry gets from everyday life uses of language that,somehow, were already assumed as literary by the formalists. Amongmany possible examples I cite the poems by Melo e Castro "Nao sim"("No yes") or "Pendulum" or "Objectotem" ("Objectotem") (Anthologyof Concrete Poetry in Portugal, pp.54-56). Concrete poetry is indeed anexcellent example of the changes to which literariness is subject. Visualand experimental poetry imply a change in the concept of the literary. Irecall the statement by Roman Jakobson in Modern Russian Poetry: "Theobject of literary science is not literature but literariness." To which B.Eikhenbaum adds "that is, what makes a given work a literary work."And in this context it is also important to note the need expressed byRussian formalism of a confrontation, based on linguistics, betweenpoetic language and current language, according to the idea that youcan provide various kinds of series at different historical moments (B.Eikhenbaum, "Theory of the Formal Method", in Theory of Literature:Texts by the Russian Formalists, presented by T. Todorov, 1978, Lisbon,Ediçôes 70, p. 52). We must also note the proximity, in the periodTodorov (op. cit) describes as the first phase of Russian formalism,with futurism and the avant-garde practice that characterizes it, and towhich it provides a somewhat theoretical service. Formalism fostered anaesthetic idea about the sign because of an interest in the technical issuesof language. Not coincidentally, the claim by visual and concrete poetryof a vanguard position strengthened this modality in the encounterdelimited by the triangle—literary and current rather than literal.

It is common to find an attitude of incomprehension when facedwith strangeness, the unexpected, and the different. These are threeattributes of visual poetry that give it, according to Hatherly, an avant-garde status. The concrete poetry of Mallarmé, or the readings ofJames Joyce and Ezra Pound that their followers promote, extends thetheme of literariness. Melo e Castro sees in the work of Pound "ourway of being creative and poetic" (1973:51). This involves challengingwriting techniques in terms of creative writing and reading because ofthe importance that Pound in "The Pisan Cantos" (1917-1949) givesto the poem's visual factors and the economy of the condensed textthat the visual dimension emphasizes. A common feature of thesedemonstrations is the will to achieve new areas of signification, exploringthe "natural illegibility of writing" (Hatherly, 1975:26). Or maybe toreach the threshold of some rotating words.

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The sequence of drawings, "visual texts" by Hatherly (1975), withtitles like "Bruscamente" ("Suddenly"), "Os Cardumes da Palavra"("The Shoals of the Word") or "Esferas do Ininteligivel" ("Spheres ofthe Unintelligible") or "Le Plaisir du texte" ("The Pleasure of Text")(an obvious allusion to Barthes) show calligraphic evolutions in circularmovements, text columns forming dense patches, jagged lines wherethe word is drawn more to be guessed than read. In some "visual texts"there appears a constellation where the web of lines closes progressivelyto form blind spots, or also a kind of word-island in the sea of the blanksheet.

KWY, A PLASTIC CONSCIENCE OF THE WORLD

A'ff y magazine is another reference when we try to highlightsimilarities between plastic arts and the imaginary of writing. Foundedin Paris by two immigrant Portuguese artists, René Bertholo andLourdes Castro, it was issued in twelve numbers between 1958 and1964. It was experimental and screenprinted and didn't comply withinstitutional rules or protocol and had a strong "nomadic" core whichdefined its collective and adventurous temperament. It was initiallyconceived with an epistolary attitude, a letter to be sent to friends, anaspect that gives it a performative and participatory dimension. "Theconcept of privacy that governs the initial conception of/Tffy extendsimmediately to an aesthetic and editorial privacy that removes themagazine from broader normative and rational contingencies" (Candeias,2001:89).

In addition to the founding artists, the magazine relied on theinvolvement of a number of artists who had as a common affinityemigration or cultural exile to which the policies of "Estado Novo" inPortugal forced them. They are Gonçalo Duarte, José Escada, CostaPinheiro and Joao Vieira. Jan Voss and Christo were the other twoforeign artists also involved in this experience that went beyond thecreation of a magazine, which in itself was an important event. Wecan also speak of a group that gave expression to innovative aestheticattitudes in the production of KWY. It would be difficult not to recallhere a field where approximations are established between differentforms of experimentation as well as bridges between the literary and theplastic. From the enormous graphic potential of the title, which consistsof three letters that are not used in Portuguese, to the material providedby the support base and its combination with the plastic creations thatmade KWY, there are multiple reasons that justify the reference to themagazine in this essay. As an autonomous object it is already deeplystudied ', and it is important here above all to highlight the side of poetry(for example the participation of Herberto Helder in issue three) andthe extension of the plastic on the literary. Above all KWY is willingto experiment, experience, and witness a poetic that answers for itself,and to that extent the magazine responded to a number of concernswhere the activated word of the concrete poets and the drawing of theexperimental and visual poets was also important as an awareness of the"plasticity of the world."

Allied to the experiences of exile and the first steps ofinternationalization of Portuguese art, there was an eager need tomanifest the trends that came to the fore in the cultural capitals suchas Paris in the mid-twentieth century. KWY Portuguese artists madethe publication an experiential instrument of graphic innovation. Inthis respect René Bertholo (which we will also find in publications suchas Hidra/ Hydra) demonstrated his special talent for the graphic andimaginative capabilities that date back to more modest publications heworked on in Lisbon as a student at the School of Fine Arts (Candeias,2001:88). The early issues of A^Wy show influences of tachism, includingnon-figurative language, traces of lyricism, and even action painting.The literary contributions are important in reflecting the same intimateand secret spirit that arise from the artisanal conditions in which the firstthree numbers were produced. "In these early numbers, the intimate.

almost romantic, geography of A'f^yis reflected even in the runs that,until number four, do not exceed eighty-five copies, printed in the veryroom the artists (Lourdes Castro and René Bertholo) shared" (Candeias,2001:89).

In issue four, with a cover designed by Costa Pinheiro, thereis a literary contribution by Nuno de Bragança, a novelist and alsoa significant personality involved in critical activities particularlywith regard to thé emerging New Portuguese Cinema. This type ofcollaboration lies in what may be called "aesthetics of the absurd"(Candeias, 2001:90) associated with a project that was againstcommitments and editorial statutes, with a favorable climate for thereception of works identified in the neo-dadaist manner. Also because ofthis attitude, it makes sense to compare KWY with other experimentalmovements similar to dadaist practices. The demand for the abolitionbetween life and art and the rejection of "analytical (commercial)writing" that we find in concrete poetry inspire a comparison.

Issue five of KWY signals the beginning of the participation of JoaoVieira which led to the broadening of the range of literary contributionsthat include, among others, Herberto Helder (returning) or MarioCesariny (and poets connected to another type of experience andimaginary, like Pedro Tamen), but always essential names in the renewalof the landscape that marked the 1960s. This change in direction of themagazine shows new interests and an increase in aesthetic complexitythat incorporates contributions from leading Spanish painters such asAntonio Saura and Manolo Millares.

"The defense of art informel which resumed in ÂTfFy reflecteda new understanding, allowing these young Portuguese publishersto broaden their aesthetic horizons hitherto more or less confined toLyrical Abstraction" (Candeias, 2001:91). Art informel values naturallyprovide contact with action painting, tachism, the exploitation of signageand a whole range of writing, that place this magazine at the core in thedebate on the relations between sign, painting, and poetic landscape.

This fifth issue marks a shift both in terms of increased circulation(500 copies) and the loss of the radical autonomy given the responsibilityto publish a magazine with a specific cultural purpose. It was letterpressprinted but screen printing is not abandoned. An example is the threepanel imposing silkscreen print by Saura, Crucificción {Crucifixion),"where the artist explores the raw horror of human disfigurement"(Candeias, 2001:91). The magazine then went through differentchanges, seeming to compromise its initial urge and to restrict creativediversity (although such values never ceased to be restated). But issueseven (Winter 1960) "rescues" the original purpose and highlightsthe very original cover in burlap by Christo, denoting the perceptionof the phenomenology of everyday life, which would evolve later intocommitments between the informal and new figuration. Dependingon the inclination of each of the later issues, the magazine reflectedan interest in social phenomena. The critical perspectives on massculture also became part of the editorial stance within the magazine.Both in the literary texts and in international collaborations therewere above all signs of existentialist reflection. The magazine alsowelcomed participation connected with the Fluxus movement, namelyRobert Filliou, for whom questions of painted poetry and the freedomthat allows each human being to become an artist are relevant. Thesefactors made Filliou one of the persons involved in the discussion of theinteractions between experimentalism and avant-garde movements thathad taken the word, the sign, and graphics as chosen material.

Another perspective that clarifies the impact of unintended breaksfrom ideological militancy is nouveau realism. The French movementemerged in 1960 and showed influences of dadaism by highlightingthe banality of everyday art. Yves Klein (1928 -1962) was one of itsexponents. This determination to discuss "with unusual critical andsatirical vivacity the current implications of this aesthetics of themanipulation of the common object," is reflected in issue eleven of KWY(coordinated by Christo and dedicated to the memory of Klein who hadrecently died unexpectedly).

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Nouveau realism insists on the theme of the emptinessand triviality of consumer society and the absurd condition ofcontemporary man in view of the "Camusian precept that the absurdman does not explain, describe, converge, and update fully in thisphenomenology of the ordinary objects, of the everyday waste, bondedand transferred according to the chance of circumstances" (Candeias,2001:98). This kind of attention to the critique of everyday life, the useof spare sentences, of collage, and a kind of anti-narrative suspendedbetween waste and the casual side of what one lives, are some ofthe concerns captured and translated by KWY at this stage, as thecontribution by Daniel Spoerri signifies. The decision to explore anduse chance as "an organizing principle of significant forms" (Candeias,2001:99) approaches poetic experimentalism in whose genesis we findprinciples of this nature.

The last published issue of AT WF (number twelve, winter 1963)retained the same "playful matrix" of the first issue of the magazineagainst the nostalgic idea of end. The end oí KWY came about as themain artists of the project pursued their individual careers rather thansubmit to the schedule of traditional periodical-type publications. Theartists who carried out the magazine and identified themselves withit gained visibility with this important set of publications, definedat the distance of more than four decades as a pleasure for visualformulations that lie beyond the conventional visual arts activity basedon the sovereignty of painting. KWY made of its pages a proposalfor the acquisition of new visual codes grounded in the enjoyment ofprinting and dissemination as possible links to an "aesthetic of theabsurd."

The end of ATWy magazine didn't have a specific editorialjustification, "the act of closing KWY would assert itself as free orarbitrary as had been its birth" (Candeias, 2001:99). The artisticsuccess that Lourdes Castro, René Bertholo, Voss, and Christo wereachieving internationally also helps to explain this epilogue. "As everyabsurd work, without past nor future, KWY lived more of contingencyand chance circumstances and less of a need for ethical or aestheticintervention" (Candeias, 2001:101). One result of this uncompromisingattitude was a playful space from which we can also find a feast of theword (and its reverse as the effervescence of sense) that some examplesof concrete and visual poetry also participate in.

Various artists, if MT covers 1958 - 1964Photography by Filipe Braga

JOÂO VIEIRA: SO WE HAVE DOUBTS ON LANGUAGE

Painting letters was apparently the plastic purpose of Joâo Vieirawhose work, tinted by experimentalism, can be traced back to the groupand Parisian experience of the magazine KWY. Any approach to therelationship between painting and concretism would be incompletewithout the mention of the role played by a publication (screen printed)and a group of artists who gravitated around it—KWY expressed, aswe have just seen, a particular way of connecting visual thinking to theworld.

Viera's contributions to Hidra magazine (organized by E.M. deMelo e Castro) are an indication of his proximity to concrete poetry.He created the cover for the 1966 number from a variation of the lettersthat make up the spelling of the title, with which he builds a compactbut understandable blotch. In the same edition were published works byEurico, Areal, Manuel Baptista, and René Bertholo (another member ofthe KWY group). Also in this edition Herberto Helder (whose knownforays into experimental poetry were already mentioned in this essay)published a text, laid out in two columns, with title printed in boldcapital letters, "An author begins to have doubts about his language andpresentiments about one of his languages—meanwhile in the middlethere are objects, emotions, words and a sketched order of all thisauthor Herberto Helder." ' Doubts about language and presentimentsabout another language could well be the summary of a whole programof analysis applicable to both visual and concrete poetry, and to thecontext in which Joâo Vieira researches letters and chromatics, or editingpossibilities, always based on the territories of painting. Painting appearsthrough successive zones of usually compact textuality, and words areadded according to movements and painting techniques. Also working inthe gap and spaces between the signs the words finally assert themselvesthrough the claim of the body, the subject, and ultimately, the letteritself This last point gives a performance character (for the first time inPortugal) to various interventions of the artist.

Evidence of Vieira's widespread experimentations can be seenin his use of the letter as absolute raw material. "To Joâo Vieira, thediscovery and use of the pictorial possibilities of signs and letters leadsto a true reinvention of painting in a particular idiosyncratic code thatnever stops being iconological to become textual" (Fernandes, 2002:

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22). This exploration of the painting gives rise to a "semiotic liberation"in which text codes are transferred to another register and createimages of signs (idem, ibid.). This work, developed from gesture andgraphic inevitability, creates an autonomous system of representationwhere it has an unmistakable language. Here the signs are a startingpoint for organizing the space of the painting where all the letters canbe transformed—involving themselves in regular patches often in ananagrammatic way.

Building a text and giving it plastic visibility is an aesthetic needarising from the generational environment in which Vieira started hiscultural activity. This was marked by one of the references of surrealism,the so-called Group of Gelo coffee house, a get-together from the 1950sthat brought together poets and painters who made the surroundingenvironment especially conducive to fruitful interactions. This explainsthe reference by Melo e Castro to a "literary drawing" that naturallyinterested him, with the implicit recognition of the possibilities createdby Surrealism to the amplification of visual poetry. 'Although this isnever noticeable at the level of citation, but is manifested in terms ofintention, the artist works with poetic material that becomes plasticallyrecoded, making of this semiotic intervention a re-inscription. To movethe poem, or its initial and founding reading, to the pictorial domainamounts to giving letters the status of an abstraction that should notbe confused with abstract painting. The artist "escapes the reductivedichotomy between abstraction and figuration that, in the 1950s, stillmarks the aesthetic discussion in Portugal, proposing and enacting anew kind of gestural abstraction that is not a pure pictorial abstraction."There is a whole universe of concrete things on which this paintingdepends. The spectator doesn't sense them in the form of figure, butcollects all the evidence from the gesture, which makes these concretethings from the alphabet the material of a fertile poern (Fernandes, 2002:24).

WHAT IS REPEATED & REINVENTED IN JOÄO VIEIRA

The reversibility that anagrams generate was treated in a set ofVeira's paintings from the 1960s and 1970s, where what was repeatedwas also what was reinvented. The artist draws the means to developnew areas of experimentation from this ability to reinvent, to shape hislanguage, making it sensual and ethically demanding. He's convincedthe letter is a body in space. It is, of course, a principle that is shaped bythe options of experimental poetry. In addition to his participation inHidra, Joào Vieira worked on another magazine, Operaçâo (Operation),for whose covers he was also responsible. This publication is an exampleof the rupture by authors linked to concretism and experimentalism. In1967 Vieira was responsible for creating a magazine-object, Operaçâo 1(Operation 1), that stands out for its novelty in the cultural panoramaof the time—it is a magazine-object where the poetic material acquiresa three-dimensionality that reconfigures editorial concepts and opensup new opportunities for the art object. Much more than inventing newmedia for a poetic speech, Vieira conceives new messages where theliterary and writing, editing and printing, are incorporated in the plasticcreation. The individualization of each copy, its differentiation, theability to raise the unique in the diversity of the multiple, are importantfeatures of this magazine where patterns from the classic letter are re-used to create a different cover for each copy.

In this context we can invoke the editorial creations for (¿etcmagazine and books from the publishing house with the same name.Both shared an alternative and dissident spirit and were directed byVitor Silva Tavares who stamped it with his unmistakable aestheticpersonality. As a publishing house (¿etc materialized texts by variousfundamental poets in the panorama of contemporary Portugueseliterature including Herberto Helder, an author with whom Joao Vieirakept a relevant complicity. It's thanks to them that verbal materialfor new paradigms of plastic realization came about within the book

as an autonomous art object despite its condition of being a multiple.Therefore it's no surprise to find Herberto Helder's text "Kodak" (1984)transposed by Joao Vieira where the poem appears printed under a setof patches and signs specific to the painter's vocabulary, who thus givesthe literary discourse other meanings. The result is the reconciliation ofan action painting universe and a poetic universe, with verses like these:"The lagging profession of suffocated islands," "The light is based onabstract parcels," "Vertiginous children drunken childhood" (HerbertHelder). '" The poem thus acquires a different texture. The reading isdivided into several levels of meaning. And because it is specifically thepoetry of Helder, the margins between verbal, visual, and text advancesand fixes itself in the center of the page which is no longer that of anordinary book.

In the 1970s there was a turning point in the work of Joao Vieirathat involved the use of industrial materials (such as polyurethane),while letters remained firmly at the conceptual base. An exhibitiontitled The Spirit of the Letter at Judite da Cruz Gallery (1970) showedthis new strand of work questioning its dadaist inspiration. Thiswork by Vieira knows the ephemeral, but also the festive meaning ofcreation, understood here as spectacle and happening, thus questioningtheatricality." These issues are referred to by Ernesto de Sousa inan article in Coloquio Artes magazine at the end of the decade whichquestions the letter, text, and context, leading to an approach in thisphase of Vieira's work as "the scene of writing" and the correlation ofthis with the "arts scene."

One characteristic of this new direction of Vieira's work requiresthe participation of the spectator, without a doubt one of the mostimportant aspects of poetic experimentalism and concrete poetry,in their willingness to confront the subject with the possibilities ofreading and the mechanisms of learning / unlearning of language. Theexhibition The Spirit of the Letter used large format letters in woodwith a plan to use them in an entirely different context which wouldultimately destroy them. This is the beginning of a phase that involvesmany different projects some of which were left in the planning stagelike M.A.R. (Sea) (1970). The idea was to give back the sea to the sea, ormore exactly to throw three large buoys in the sea, each correspondingto one of the letters (M, A, and R). A certain idea of salvation or"survival" can be part of this operation—however this is possible onlywith a performative dimension. This is working the letters to build apersonal grammar, but also, according to a resonance of situationism,as a grammar for the use of the living (Raoul Vaneigem). In thisperspective Joao Vieira presents a work where the theme of the showdenounces social and aesthetic conformism. "Joào Vieira continues totest the infinite possibilities of painting and the infinite possibilities ofthe alphabet ( . . . ) continues to test the experimental possibilities of themedia and support bases he uses" (Fernandes, 2002:30). In this endlessdesire to experiment, the viewer sees a constant expansion of saying andbeing.

Ernesto de Sousa's article in Coloquio Arteíhñngs together avast theoretical apparatus which includes references to conceptual art,structuralism, Foucault, Derrida, Umberto Eco, and artists like DonaldJudd and Sol Lewitt to inscribe Joào Vieira in a line of provocation,which is mainly a "vocation" and as such "primacy of imagination on thethought and re-thought." The article is, by its deconstructionist style,the assertion of a critical complicity which emphasizes the discovery ofmatter and an experiential dimension.

It is almost inevitable to find Melo e Castro when discussingthis period of aesthetic experimentation. It comes as no surprise thento find an allusion to the work of Melo e Castro in a piece by Vieirafrom the series Mammographies (1977) at the same Belém gallerywhere Alternativa Zero took place. These concerns are echoed in theconclusion in de Sousa's essay:

"The future because now we live the plague: Uneinterminable défaite '̂ but bringing together all the textsand performing them ourselves, we will imagine the

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context with our bodies, our hands, and all the letters as weface the Final Judgment" (Sousa, 1979:38).The essay (namely this quote) is designed using blank spaces, thus

creating rhythms in the distribution of phrases, and opening breathingmoments and pauses. These are well known features of experimental andvisual poetry that in this perspective can be viewed as a meta-languageover the meaning of performance in the artist's work.

We highlighted Joao Vieira's reasons to select the letter as theprofound reason of his painting, making it a mapped writing in thelabyrinths of the word. Now we must emphasize the harmony betweenhis work and international art at that time. Both conceptual art and popart belong to a sensibility the artist brings to production contexts thatare unprecedented in the Portuguese scene of the 1960s and 1970s. Hisrelationship with KWY magazine, published with a touch of artistryand elaborate workmanship, illustrates his generation's confluence withthe international art scene. On the other hand the work of Joào Vieirahas a strong and erudite cultural affinity with art practices such asKandinsky's treatment of color, Chinese calligraphy, and the surrealexperience enshrined in "cadraves exquis" (Silva, 2002:68-69). Theselatter aspects also influenced visual poetry. This tie can be emphasizedif we consider that the attitude of Vieira coincides with the situationof English and American artists who had a professional relationshipwith the media and industry and amalgamated "their artistic practicewith the challenges of urban life where they found inspiration and thepermanent questioning of the challenged autonomy of artistic practice"(Silva, 2002: 70).

Where the spirit of the letter becomes matter, irony, andiconographie destiny, we can evoke language games (Wittgenstein)and decline thereafter theoretical questions such as the ones Weitzformulates when he says that "the problem of the nature of art is likethe problem of the nature of games." By questioning what are the realfunctions of writing, "through an unusual multiplication of its supports"(Silva, 2002:71), the artist shares in their own way the concernsradicalized by other plastic experiences, to tell us that there is an ethicalrequirement where painting and history no longer need to relate ina model of reconciliation. Joào Miguel Fernandes Jorge noticed thisapropos the images of Vieira's writing, asking if the painter questionedhis memory in relation to some pictures from the collection of theNational Museum of Ancient Art and questioned writing as self-imageand speech. ''Jorge tried to understand how a work of art concernedwith writing and painting, "incorporates and removes the symbolicuniverse that draws us, because by projecting on the canvas distress,weight, and a sense of seeing the world, it also communicates and revealsthe demands of an art that expresses fear (of history), and tells us aboutthe represented objectivity through images of writing "(Jorge, 1990:128).

This way of feeling the look, giving it a destination that can bewriting (rather than drawing), delimits in Joao Vieira the specificityof an idea of painting that can be accepted as a further contributionto understand the influences and range of concrete and visual poetryevents. Melo e Castro took upon himself the charge, with intuition anda sense of opportunity, of recording it properly, recalling the importanceof calligraphy and the whole visual training and relationship withschool, rooted in biographical circumstances (the artist's parents wereteachers in primary school). '•* The rules of good copy and dictation weretransmuted into a painting made with its origins in mind—this placeprior to the letter that was to lead to the thick pleasure of paint and thedecision to take the word.

Eduardo Paz Barroso is Cathedratic Professor of Communication Sciences at theHuman and Social Sciences Faculty of the Fernando Pessoa University.

Work done under the "PO.EX'70-80 - Digital Archive of Portuguese ExperimentalLiterature" (Ref. PTDC/CLE-LLI/098270/2008) project, financed by EuropeanUnion FEDER funds through the COMPETE Program and by the PortugueseFoundation for Science and Technology (FCT)

Translation: Catarina Figueiredo Cardoso

ENDNOTES1. From the Presença magazine, founded in 1927 by Branquinho da Fonsecaand José Regio, which would become the cornerstone of the second modernismmovement in Portugal (Translator's Note, TN).

2. See Eduardo Paz BARROSO, Jorge Martins A Luz e a Pintura (Light andPainting), 2005, Lisbon, Caminho.

3. NETO JORGE, Luiza, Os Sitios Sitiados (The Besieged Sites), 1973, Lisbon,Plátano, p. 266.

4. A textual translation would render, for "tu-me-fac-to," "you-to me-fact." Thepoem revolves around the genre declination of pronouns in Portuguese: alguns isthe masculine plural for some, outros is the masculine plural for other, teu is themasculine possessive singular for yours, and tua is the feminine possessive singularfor yours (TN).

5. The part of tbe informal art movment which used "signs" rather than"matter," meaning "formless," or "away from form." Informel is related to abstractexpressionism, but seeks to strip away all reference to representation, and to becomea new kind of international language, using calligraphic marks or signs, http://www.artdesigncafe.com/Art-Informel-1992 (TN).

6. LINK magazine, 1964, "Coma 1er poesia concreta" ("Hovi to read concretepoetry") apud Hatberly, 1975b.

7. The exhibition "KIVY ?3ris 1958 -1968" at Centro Cultural de Belém, Lisbon,2001 (curated by Margarida Acciaiuoli) led to a massive catalog with essays onthe movement, many texts on the artists participating in the exhibition, witha large reproduction of works and the presentation of the twelve numbers thatmake up the publication and its chronology (see particularly pp. 104 - 123). Seealso "Revista KWY-da abstracçâo lírica à nova figuraçào (1958 - 1964)/ KIVYMagazine—from lyrical abstraction to new figuration (1958 - 1964)" by Ana FilipaCandeias (dissertation, mimeographed edition), 1996, UNL, Lisbon. See also, andspecifically about the further development of the work of one of the foreign artistsinvolved in this project, Voss e o Fio Magnético/ Voss and the Magnet Wire byEduardo Paz Barroso, 2002, published by Fernando Santos Gallery, Porto.

8. Hidra, organization by E.M. de Melo e Castro, layout and graphics by E.M. deMelo e Castro and Eduardo Calvet de Magalhàes, Porto, 1966, n.o 1, p. 63.

9. On this see the article by E.M. de Melo e Castro ''Letra a Letra''' ("Letterby Letter") in Coloquio Artes magazine, issue 1, Lisbon, Fundaçào CalousteGulbenkian, 1971, and the reference by Joào Fernandes (cited, p. 23). RaquelHenriques da Silva (2002: 68) also supports the classification of visual poetry forJoào Vieira's work "in the precise although very fluid terms that the concept thenassumed."

10. Some of these works are reproduced in the exhibition catalog J'oào Vieira Bodiesof Letters, Porto, Museu de Serralves, 2002, pp. 226-240.

11. At the exhibition Alternativa Zero: Tendencias Polémicas na Arte Portuguesa(see dedicated entry), Joào Vieira, who played a major role, offered an empty spaceto the public's creativity.

12. Une interminable défaite—An interminable defeat. French in the original. (TN)

13. We refer to the exhibition by Joao Vieira Images of Writing at the NationalMuseum of Ancient Art, Lisbon, 1988.

14. E.M. de Melo e Castro, ''Letra a letra"/ "Letter by letter," Coloquio Artes n°1, FCG, Lisboa 1971; and also José Luís Porfirio, injfoào Vieira, catalog of theexhibition KWYPuis 1958-1968; Lisbon, Centro Cultural de Belém, 2001, p. 322.

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BIBLIOGRAPHYAguiar e Silva, V. Manuel, Teoria da Literatura, Almedina, Coimbra, 1974.

Alberto Marques, José e Melo e Castro, E.M. de (Org.) Antologia da PoesiaConcreta em Portugal, Assirio & Alvim, Lisbon, 1973.

Amaral, Fernando Pinto, "O Regresso ao sentido anos 70/80", in A Phala Um sáculode poesia, Assirio & Alvim, Lisbon, 1988 pp.158-167.

Barthes, Roland, Ensaios Críticos, Ediçôes 70, Lisbon, 1977.

Candeias, Ana Filipa, "A revista KWY" in KWY Paris 1958-1968, Assirio &Alvim, Lisbon, 2001 pp. 87 - 101.

Castro, E. M. de Melo e "Ezra Pound: da obra". Coloquio Letras n'll, FundaçâoCalouste Gulbenkian, Lisbon, 1973 pp. 50-53.

"As vanguardas na Poesia Portuguesa do século XX", Biblioteca Breve, Instituto deCultura e Lingua Portuguesa, Ministerio da Educaçâo, Lisbon, 1980.

Cesariny, Mario. As mäos na agua a cabeça no mar, Assirio & Alvim, Lisbon, 1985.

Cuadrado, Perfecto E., "Palavra /imagem: confluencias", in Mario Cesariny, Assiriofií^foim, Lisbon, 2004, pp. 217-226.

Eco, Umberto, Obra Abena, Editora Perspectiva, Sao Paulo, 1984 (1st ed. 1968).

Fernandes, Joao, "A letra e o corpo na obra de Joao Vieira", in Joào Vieira Corpos deLetras, Museu de Serralves, Porto, 2002, pp.20 — 31.

Hatherly, Ana, A reinvençâo da leitura, Futura, Lisbon, 1975"Visualidade do texto. Uma tendencia universalista da poesia portuguesa", in

Coloquio Letras, n" 35, 1977, pp. 5-17.

Jorge, Joao Miguel Fernandes, "Joao Vieira", in O que resta da manhä. Quetzaleditores, Lisbon, 1990, pp. 126 -129.

Judice, Nuno, "A Noçào de Poema," colecçao cadernos de poesia, Publicaçôes DomQuixote, Lisbon, 1972.

Poesia Reunida 1967-2000, Publicaçôes Dom Quixote, Lisbon, 2000.

Juin, Hubert, "La révolution poétique de Mallarmé", in Magazine Littéraire, 'Janvier 1975, n° 96, pp. 18-22.

Lourenço, Eduardo, "Entre o ser e o silencio cem anos de poesia portuguesa", m APhala Um século de poesia, Assirio & Alvim, Lisbon, 1988, pp.202 - 207.

Nava, Luis Miguel, "Os Anos 60 Realismo e Vanguarda", in A Phala Um século depoesia, Assirio & Alvim, Lisbon, 1988, pp. 150 - 157.

Neto Jorge, Luiza, Os Sitios Sitiados, Lisbon, Plátano, 1973.

Pimenta, Alberto, "Que poesia exprime(o)mental?", in A Phala Um século de poesia,Assirio & Alvim, Lisbon, 1988, pp. 144-149.

Rosa, A. Asor, "Vanguarda", Einaudi, INCM, Lisbon, 2005, pp.306-343.

Silva, Raquel H. "Joao Vieira: das letras aos corpos", m Joao Vieira Corpos deLetras, Museu de Serralves, Porto, 2002, pp.66 - 73.

Sousa, Ernesto de, "Da letra ao texto, do texto ao contexto: Joao Vieira", ColoquioArtes, n' 42, FCG, Lisbon, 1979, pp. 30 - 39.

Thomas, Karin, Diccionario del Arte Actual, Editorial Labor, Barcelona, 1982.

Tzara, Tristan: Sete manifestos Dada (1963), Hiena editora, Lisbon, 1987.

Weitz, Morris "O papel da teoria Estética", in O que é a arte? (Carmo d Orey, org.),Dinalivro, Lisbon, 2007, pp. 61 - 77.

ALTERNATIVA ZEROEduardo Paz Barroso

\ lternativa Zero ' is one of the most remarkable examples of/jLPortuguese aesthetic innovation. The exhibition took place in 1977in an institutional space now gone—the National Gallery of ModernArt, at Belém in Lisbon, near the river Tagus. It was due to the initiativeof José Ernesto de Sousa (1921-1988). In 1997 the Serralves Museumof Contemporary Art organized an exhibition entitled Perspective:Alternativa Zero ^ where two decades later a situation that has profoundlyinfluenced the way of doing and acting artistically in Portugal wasreconstituted.

Ernesto de Sousa was a multifaceted personality, a plastic artist(or aesthetic operator as he preferred to describe his creative activity),a researcher with an ethnographic leaning with interests in African andPortuguese folk art, and an art critic with links to cinema. He directedthe movie D. Roberto (1962) which contributed to the renewal of cinemain Portugal. He participated actively in the genesis of the PortugueseCinema Novo movement (infiuenced by French Nouvelle Vague/New Wave). He also carried on an extensive activity of disseminationof quality films within the movement of the cineclubs (or film clubs,cultural structures that promote debate, and constituted a pole ofresistance to the totalitarian political hegemony of Estado Novo). Sousais a fundamental personality to refocus the discussion about what wasthe artistic vanguard, and the remembrance of what was to becomecontemporary in Portugal. Intellectually, he moved away from the neo-realist aesthetic widespread in the Portuguese cultural life of the 1940s,and to which he was committed (preferring it to the surrealist eventsthat positioned themselves in other directions). Finally he followedpersonal paths that led him to discover and contact artists interestedin the expansion of aesthetic consciousness such as Joseph Beuys, whoSousa interviewed at length at Kassel's Documenta 5 (1972). Along thesame lines he had a special empathy with the Fluxus movement. RobertFilliou was another artist with whom he got involved, whose work andattitude he especially defended and promoted. This set of intellectualcharacteristics made Sousa a person open to new artistic proposalsthat were emerging in Portuguese reality. As for Alternativa Zero, heincorporated a series of works relating to the freedom of expressionso inherent to the changes arising in the visual arts scene in the 1960s.These changes found the social and cultural conditions to expressthemselves fully with the institutionalization of democracy following themihtary coup of April 1974 which put an end to the Estado Novo and thecolonial war

The replica built in Serralves Museum (1997) inscribes the eventthat was Alternativa Zero in the logic of retrospective and monographexhibitions that reassessed this recent but decisive past such as TheSixties: Art Scene in London (Barbican Center, London, 1993) orReconsidering the Object of Art (MOCA, Los Angeles, 1995). Therelationship between future and past that has always obsessed artisticconsciousness found a number of exhibition venues at the approach ofthe end of the twentieth century. And Portugal was not (fortunately) anexception.

Sousa's idea to create an exhibition that had marks of authorship(what we now call a curator) led him to clearly take risks in his choices.This was a reflection of his personal vision of art as a process ofchange. In this respect the initiative pioneered the application of theguiding principles of art in the 1970s—making of life an exhibition act,finding individual poetry in small gestures and behaviors, enhancing

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